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[ELECTROHERMIT]

Is there a way to turn off the shadows when rendering in ART Ray Tracer? I believe I had read that even after turning off shadows on all scene lights, the ART Ray Tracer will still render shadows on an object. Thanks

[Kyle]

Nope, no way to turn them off in ART.  I wish there was, it makes it so I cant render light coming through windows properly without leaving out the glass. Maybe combining two renders, one with and one without. But that's no fun.

[thecolclough]

i think what we need is for the shadow algorithm to be updated to take account of the transparency of the casting object.  that way, if your glass was set to 2% opacity, for example, then it'd cast 2% of the normal depth of shadow.

...oh dear, just look at us - the paint's barely dry on v1.0, and we're already compiling our wishlists for v1.1...

[kreator]

yup! still waiting for copy an paste objects in scene mode without having to manually add things!

[ELECTROHERMIT]

Kyle, I was thinking the same. I'm going to try rendering the same scene in 3 modes. The first render with scanline, no shadows, then the second render with ART Ray trace, and a third with with the ambient occluder attribute ON. All three rendered without moving the camera. I'll import all three frames into Photoshop and use the scanline render as the base image, the ART ray trace above it with the mode set to multiply (or the like) and the Occlusion layer likewise set to darken - for finer shadow tweak. I think with a mix of all three layers there should be more shadow nuance control. I have already done a rough test, and it does work.

I believe the same 3 mode mixing could be done with a movie. The scene sequence would have to be rendered 3 times, which would be epic, but the .png frame sequences could each be imported in AfterEffects and once again with transparency controls and mode blending, I believe the gamma of the object and the nuance of the shadows could be more finely controlled. The down side being the render time, however it is a work around.

Thanks for filling me in, I also hope this ART shadow control can be implemented, it's a real show stopper at the moment.

[Gyperboloid]

Hm, I don't understand that. Because if I turn off shadows in light element properties no shadows appear in ART rendering no matter though if shadow casting and/or resaving is chossen in object element properties 

[ELECTROHERMIT]

I wanted to update a thought I had on doing a post-render, post-production in AfteEffects in order to render with Ray Tracing, but having some CONTROL over the darkness of the Ray Traced shadows, which are quite dark by default. A quick method of adjustment is simply to render your movie with no shadows. Render the movie again, but turn on ART RAY shadows and go for a pretty detailed grain and smooth edge transition of the shadow, where the shadow fades out. Import both footage layers into AfterEffects with the Shadow render version over the no shadow footage layer. Set the AfterEffects ArtRayTrace shadow layer MODE to Darken, or Multiply and lower the opacity (of the footage layer) down to the below 20 percent opacity and that should be the sweet spot. Adjust up or down according to the gamma of the overall scene/ambiance you desire. Darkness intensity of ART RAY trace shadow is now adjustable. In addition, I would suggesting adding a 1 pixel or 2 pixel blur to the shadow layer to blur the rendered shadow grain, maybe even higher pixel blur depending on the style of the animation. 

[Trevor]

yup! still waiting for copy an paste objects in scene mode without having to manually add things!

hahaha, just noticed you re-posted this here.
I added this to the dev forum since I think that forum would be more appropriate for requests otherwise there would be no definition between the forums - that is unless a mod or Steve objects and considers the dev forum closed (pre-v1)?

There were a few things that never made V1, but Steve did say he was stabilising V1 for Release rather than adding new features.

for a 1.1 though I still say we need
Copy/Paste Scene elements
Toggle ALL shadows in scanline (I hate having to enable shadows for everything)
what thecolclough said about shadow opacity (2% trans = 2% shadow + tint (diffuse colour of object casting shadow))
Multi-threaded Render (break the image into small segments, single core CPU wont be any faster though it may look it, but multi-core CPU will be MANY times FASTER)
HDR images + Tonemapper (this is probably the hardest request and might be v1.2)


Bug report time,
Win 10 16251
Clicking render works once, after that clicking render again the render controls appear but the image options window does not.
Click close and the menu bar becomes active but the rest of the screen stays in render mode
Click render again and all is well, image options show and render starts.
click close and window returns to object/scene mode.

Trev

[Gyperboloid]

Guys, I still trying to understand what you were talking about shadows not be able to turn them off in ART renderer. You mean turning off particular objects to not cast shadows while others do and being enabled the lights to cast shadows ?